Evoking Visual Rhetoric

• Ernest Hemingway once said: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a type writer and bleed.” • Many people believe that words often hold the power of a bullet, our pens pull the trigger. • This Semester when writing in my journal I began being confident about my: -sentence structure -I felt my word choices were full of heavy meaning and intellect. • After being introduced to the idea of rhetoric, which is: The study of impacting an audiences thoughts or actions through language. -I started to reevaluate my writing style. • Sentences no longer sounded poetic but cluttered and verbose. • I now saw complicated phrases that left no room to breathe. • My words were constricted by unnecessary adjectives and verbial phrases. • Every word seemed forced, a calamity. • This led me to question” -Are words too much sometimes? OR Are they Not ENOUGH? • This course helped me to realize why it is I love photography as visual rhetoric so much. • Sometimes without any intention words change the meanings and feelings behind our initial thoughts, morphing the reality of our ideals. • Sometimes words aren’t enough and visual rhetoric is. It widens the definition of rhetoric to include images. -Mood, structure, perspective, communication to the audience are crucial. • All of these components are part of why images can be so moving. • Elements of Design. How do the hues, textures, shading, and form affect the translation of the photograph to its audience? • Images have the power to capture peoples souls, innocence, love, history. That all may never be seen again. They evoke memories, inspiration, nostalgia, conviction. • They are vital in striking certain chords within the most private parts of our personalities, our aspirations, our memories. • The entire experience that surrounded that one image is forever captured. • The conversations, the laughs, the heartaches. • This is how powerful visual rhetoric is! • We as a society overuse words as a technology that has handicapped our grasp on reality. • Why should we attempt to describe beauty or innocence or heartbreak? • Photographs hold a thousand different emotions, meanings, and unsaid phrases that a simple caption may not do it justice. Words aren’t enough. • Author of the novel Blindness, Jose Saramago wrote: “Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.” • What they don’t understand about words and what they never tell you is that sometimes there aren’t enough, sometimes they’re meaningless, sometimes they don’t do justice, sometimes words fail. • And when they do, we resort to our Art. Our Photography. Our Dance. Our Music. We resort to our own forms of Visual Rhetoric.

Final Blog Post: Inquiry Project

Distortions of the Truth

What they don’t understand about words and what they never tell you is that sometimes there aren’t enough, sometimes they are meaningless, sometimes they don’t do justice.  And when you go to explain with such clarity your sadness or your happiness or the innocence of something, you just Can’t.

 Looking back on the growth that I have experienced throughout my Inquiry Project I have come to new realizations about my entire learning process.  Taking linguistic interpretations and theories, then applying them to other aspects of my life has been incredibly eye opening.  The main focus of my project being visual rhetoric, moreover how I have come to the conclusion that rhetoric is not necessary all of the time is one of these theories.  In this last installment of my analytical process, I looked at how these single words or phrases have the power to distort or in some cases completely change the meaning behind a photograph.  Take a look at the original images, conclude your own emotion towards the photo, then compare that to it’s duplicate which contains such rhetoric.  It’s funny isn’t it? How we’re able to rearrange thirty-six letters to craft our own ideas, thoughts that have reoccurred since the beginning of time become lyrical.  These reconstructed words have the power of the bullets encapsulated within a gun.   Our pens pull the trigger. 

Vividity

 

Often, I am Quiet and in Thought,

Thinking or Dreaming too vividly.

My Thoughts are Crystal Clear……….

Until the Ink Bleeds onto the Page-

Until I Try to Voice them.

I fumble, My Words Unable to Catch up to My Ideas.

These Phrases Transform Into Tragedies.

A Lense Is My Clarity.

I Discover an Unspeakable Beauty within Each Photo.

It is My Belief that Every Photograph Latches onto

Moments We Wish Would Live Forever.

Photographs are Slots for the Inexpressible,

Experiences in Our own Histories that We Have No WORDS for.

Give Me a Camera and I will Capture Instances that

Will Take you back to an Entire Memory.

The Power of the Shutter will Encapsulate what the Blink

Of Your EYE would have otherwise Sooner Forgotten. 

And Better Embody the Purity that Your Words would have otherwise Tainted.

When Words Fail,

A Photograph will Provide A Thousand More.

Evoking Emotion, Thought, Conviction, Nostalgia. 

They Express More Than Words Can

Words ruin Ones Thoughts,

Paper makes Them Rediculous.

When Words become Unclear,

I shall Focus with Photographs.

When Images become Inadequate,

I shall be Content with Silence.

Photography takes an instant out of time, 

Altering Life by Holding It Still.

What You have Caught on Film

I Captured Forever. 

It Remembers little things,

Long After You have Forgotten

Everything.

The Best thing about a Picture,

Is that It Never Changes...

Even when the People in Them Do.

When You Photograph Them in Colour,

You Photograph Their Souls.

But when You Photograph Them in B&W,

You Photograph Their Souls.

      Artists like Ansel Adams, Ted Grant, even Andy Warhol felt that photography held a much deeper meaning than something that is just a hobby for many people.  In the introduction of this Found Poem I thought that it would be important to discuss what a calamity writing can turn into.  Sometimes without any intention words change the meanings and feelings behind our initial thoughts, morphing the reality of our ideals.  Few people are blessed with the ability to write in such a way that isn’t forced, but rather magical and are able to express themselves as well as their visions perfectly.  Their visual rhetoric transcends from the pages of their works, into the minds of their readers.  Writers who are able to capture such a talent have the power to evoke inspiration, even realizations within others.  “When words become unclear I shall focus with photographs”.  Depending on the topic I believe that I have the potential to be one of those few writers, however the majority of the time I find that these expressions are better captured at the click of my shutter.  I think that the photographer often has a vision of the type of meaning that they want to translate to their viewers; sometimes the photograph has it’s own ideas in mind.  Every developed piece of film holds a different meaning to whom ever may be observing.  That is the beauty of photographs.  They capture the reality of those few moments in time that may have otherwise been forgotten, or a person that may no longer hold a special place in your life.  Photographs hold a thousand different emotions, meanings, and unsaid phrases that a simple caption may not do it justice.  I feel that photographs are not only beautiful in their art, but that they are vital in striking certain chords within the most private parts of our personalities, our dreams, our memories.  Images bring about a whole new meaning to the term Visual Rhetoric.  For they contain infinite amounts of grandiloquence without necessarily containing visual texts. These are many of the reasons why I aspire to becoming a Photo-Journalist.  To be able to travel and capture the many simplicities like a simple smile or the ruins of a war torn city, would be a dream.  My works would be involved in capturing parts of history that the world may not have otherwise given a second glance at.  This is why photography is so important.  We capture the world in it's innocence, so that we can look back and remember.

Beauty In Insignificance

       Everyone has pivotal moments in their lives whether those be certain events or even people that we encounter.  I believe with every part of my being that even moments of seemingly insignificance are special and should be captured.   Photographs have the ability to express a raw emotion.  The beauty of photography is that it absorbs moments that may otherwise be forgotten.  Photos help us to remember.  They draw us back to the way the sun felt on our skin that one hot Indian Summers day.  Back to the aches we felt in our stomachs from laughing uncontrollably over a look exchanged between two close friends.  Even back to the way the ocean smelled during our last free day of summer.  My passion for photography stems from these emotional connections that they evoke within me.  However, the artist in me can not deny a photos visual beauty.  The visual rhetoric within a piece ( the lighting, the hues, the space) is something that fascinates me as an art form.  This medium interprets the impacts of visual images on an audience's thought or actions.  Black and white still images are incredibly powerful; the most raw because color plays no role, therefor what is there is true.  The movement within the ballet series beginning from one dancer and translating then to two and then to three performers showed growth, even unity as they became one entity in a sense.  When I captured these images I was surprised at the strength of the one dancer, even in her solidarity.  When joined by her coworkers her power only seemed to be magnified.  This same solidarity can be seen within the next few black and white images.  The way that the scarf draped across the woman's face, only upheld by a few fingers, added movement and even a sense of shelter or confinement to the image.  The lighting within both of the images depicting this woman illuminated a sense of hope, especially in the way that it shined upon her eyes which are indefinitely the most powerful.  Within the next series or set of images I added a filtered film to my lens to create a retro kind of weathered tint to each of the images, making their translation to the audience much more nostalgic, even more personal.  Each photograph having rounded edges and this brown film created this All American Dream theory for me, drawing back memories of flipping through my mothers old photo albums.  I wanted to take a more abstract approach to the more compiled images towards the end of the slideshow in order to add a creative take on everyday living.  Utilizing my Diana-F Lomographic camera that enables me to overlay photographs I attempted to capture simple images at multiple rates.  The over saturated colors, multi-images, and dark fading which rounded the edges of each picture illuminated an eerie dream-like state of mind that I never imagined could have been captured.  They draw me back to different memories throughout my childhood because of such effects, even though they were captured recently.  Taking this art form further to analyze an audiences potential stake or thoughts towards them, being that they are powerful or light-hearted, makes this so much more than a hobby for me.  Capturing moments in this lamented piece of history drives me to take photography so much further than just in my personal life.  Documenting seemingly insignificant moments such as these has better lead me to discover my passion for not only photography but writing as well.  I hope to transcend both talents into a career much further down the line in the field of photo-journalism as an aspiring traveling correspondent. 

 

A Found Poem

Embark on The Voyage

You're not alone.

Manipulations of the landscape 

draw attention as persistent 

as identity.

Leave your mark.

Immerse yourself in the politics of enchantment.

Namaste.

Embark on The Voyage.

Success: A Hilly Valley

A forever inclining staircase seems misleading in representing the ideal of success.  For during the road to success there are obstacles, and moments of failure.  Just as in a valley of hill there are the highs and lows of the region.  No one person achieved greatness in a single climb to the peek of their success.  Each endeavor has its moments of trials and tribulations, the rise and declines of any achievement is to be expected.